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Nigeria ranked among markets that experienced low spam calls and unsolicited messages in 2018, a research conducted by Truecaller has revealed.Unlike in 2017, where Nigeria ranked ninth behind India, USA, Brazil, Chile, South Africa, Mexico, Turkey, and Peru respectively in the world’s top 20 list, the country dropped out of the list last year.

The Truecaller 2017 report put the average spam calls/messages an average Nigerian gets in a month at 10.2 per cent.In the 2018 report obtained by The Guardian, Truecaller found that there are common categories that tie all the spam calls together. They include operator, debt collection, bank, political, health, spam, telemarketing, financial service, scam and insurance.

It explained that the regions span across the world, and even some countries that are on the same continent differ drastically in what type of spam call they receive. Truecaller is a product of Swedish company, True Software Scandinavia AB. It is a mobile app developed to find mobile number details globally given a telephone number either using the app or their synced contacts, and has an integrated caller ID service to achieve call-blocking functionality and social media integration to keep the phonebook up-to-date with pictures and birthdays.

In 2018 alone, Truecaller claimed to have helped users block and identify 17.7 billion spam calls including the identity of 74.1 billion calls. This means that close to every fourth call that the app users receive are spam calls.Compared to 2017, Truecaller said fewer African markets are in the top 20 list: Kenya, Morocco, Egypt, and Nigeria. South Africa is the only country in the list – as a matter of fact the amount of spam calls increased from 15 to 21 spam calls/months – that is a 40 per cent increase!

According to a telecoms expert, Kehinde Aluko, the drop in spam calls and messages could be linked to subscribers’ activations of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC’s) recently introduced Do-Not-Disturb (DND) codes.

NCC had urged subscribers, who are tired of unsolicited text messages and calls to text “Stop” to “2442” or “Help” to “2442” for options.The Guardian gathered that over 12 million subscribers had as at November 2018, activated the code and blocked unwanted messages and calls.

In the 2018 list, Brazil surprisingly took over from India as the most spammed country in the world, with the average Truecaller user receiving 37.5 spam calls per month. This means that Brazil saw an 81 per cent increase in spam calls last year.

The firm cited new markets entered the list including Spain, Canada, Costa Rica, Poland, Dominican Republic, and Israel, adding that there was a big increase of spam calls in European markets like Spain (100%), Greece (54.1%) and Italy (22.7 %.) However, Turkey has seen a decrease of spam calls (18 %.)

Furthermore, Truecaller revealed that a lot of Latin American countries entered the top spam list, and they are seeing the biggest increase of spam calls. Costa Rica was ranked top as country that has seen the highest increase in terms of percentage (330 %.)

Digging deeper into the bigger markets, Truecaller found common categories that tie all these spam calls together. The biggest pattern discovered was that operators across the world are the biggest spammers.“We could also see that telemarketing calls from financial services, debt collectors and insurance related matters are spamming our users globally. Others are political, health, scam, financial service, telemarketing, among others,” the Swedish firm stated.